The ESA Sea State CCI project has produced global multi-sensor time-series of satellite altimeter significant wave height data with a particular focus for use in climate studies. A number of products are available: a Level 2P (L2P) along-track dataset, a Level 3 (L3) daily merged along-track dataset, and a L4 montly gridded product.

This first version of the Sea State CCI products is inherited from the GlobWave project, building on experience and existing outputs. It extends and improves the GlobWave products ,which were a post-processing over existing L2 altimeter agency products with additional filtering, corrections and variables. A major improvement consists in a new denoised sea surface height variable using Empirical Mode Decomposition, which was used as input to these monthly statistical fields.

The altimeter data used in the Sea State CCI dataset v1.1 come from multiple satellite missions spanning from 1991 to 2018 (ERS-1, ERS-2, Topex, Envisat, GFO, CryoSat-2, Jason-1, Jason-2, Jason-3, SARAL). Many altimeters are bi-frequency (Ku-C or Ku-S) and only measurements in Ku band were used, for consistency reasons, being available on each altimeter but SARAL (Ka band).